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It’s in the dying light through a cloudy windshield that Will comes to the realization. It's in the camp’s delivery van with the smell of strawberries still hanging around that he has a word to put to the way he feels. It’s with the tinny sound of an old CD playing that he knows he’s far gone.
Will isn’t a stranger to feeling. Despite the hardships thrown at him since an early age he was never one to put up emotional walls. He felt love and loss, anger and despair, pure, unabashed hope, and near death disappointment.
But he’s never felt a love quite like the one he’s found in the son of Hades.
Nico sits in the driver's seat, hands gripping the wheel like it’ll slip from under him and send them careening into a tree. The sunset hits his hair, his face, his eyes, lighting them up into honey. He’s not the sun incarnate like Will, but he’s something like the burning embers of a campfire.
Nico isn’t the sun incarnate, but he is the inky black of the night. He’s the shining stars and the face of the moon. He’s the sacred time where secrets can be spilled in the cover of darkness.
And Will is so, so, so in love with him.
“Shit,” Will mutters. Eyes back on the country road before them.
Nico slams on the breaks, seatbelts go taut to keep them from heading face first into the dashboard. “What? What’s wrong?” He’s scanning the horizon, looking for the interruption.
Will chuckles, probably love sick to anyone who isn’t Nico. “Nothing. Keep driving.”
Nico hits the gas again, speeding down the road. He doesn’t bring up what caused Will’s sudden revelation. He has no idea he’s the reason for it.
It isn’t until Nico comes up to a four way stop, turn signal clicking to go left, that Will tells him.
“I’m in love with you.” The signal keeps clicking. The CD sounds tinier. “I think I have for a long time.”
He knows he has loved Nico for years, he just couldn’t find a word for it. Love wasn’t something he feared or ran from. Will loved with every fiber of his being. He loved like he’d never be able to feel it again, because, as a demigod, he might not. He might die with this love burning in his chest, unheard by others.
Nico inhales sharply, almost unheard over the clicking signal. He turns, bringing it to an end, but he doesn’t make it far down the road. He moves off to the side, halfway in the grass before he stops the car. His hands stay clutching the wheel, white knuckles on the fraying leather.
Nico won’t look at Will. “You don’t mean it,” he whispers. If it was said any louder, Will suspects it wouldn’t hurt as bad.
Will swallows the ball of emotion that threatens to burst. “I’ve never meant anything more.” He pauses, letting the words hang around like the sweet smell of strawberries. “I understand if you don’t feel the same way, but I had to say it. I love you.”
Will’s afraid the words will make Nico flinch. That he’ll run away from them. That he’ll run away again, away from Will.
Nico turns slightly, not fully away from the windshield, but enough. “Why now?”
Will can’t answer that. The realization came too fast, too unprovoked. His mind couldn’t contain it for much longer, his heart even less so.
“I don’t know,” Will answers honestly. “But I needed to.”
The words out of Nico’s mouth are unexpected. Uttered so softly, so desperately. “Say it again.”
“I love you.” Will finds it’s his favorite thing to say. A phrase he doesn’t hate his voice saying. Doesn’t hate the way his carefully hidden accent slips through. He’ll say it over and over again for Nico.
Nico doesn’t say it back, not verbally. He crosses the center console, grabs Will’s face, and clashes their lips together. It’s a simple, unpracticed press of chapped lips to chapped lips.
Then, as if compelled by all the deities in their life, “I love you.”
It lands as a breath on Will’s lips, and goes straight to his heart. He sees sunbursts behind his eyes, and strawberries lingering on his lips. He could do this all day, attached to Nico by lips, hands, bodies.
Nico reluctantly pulls away first, pressing a final kiss to Will’s cheek. He unbuckles his equally frayed seatbelt, and pulls open the door.
“Nico,” Will calls over the shutting of the door. “What are you doing?”
The back door slides open. Nico climbs in, reaching for Will up front, grabbing him by the collar.
“What are you doing?” Will asks again, steadily keeping his eyes away from Nico’s lips.
“The gearshift was in the way,” Nico says, glaring at the thing like it’s personally wronged him. “And I wanted to kiss you.”
Will ignores the heat that consumes his body, and the way Nico can’t seem to look him in the eye. “In the back of the camp van?”
Nico leans in, lips ghosting Will’s. “Anywhere. Everywhere. As long as you let me.”
And how can Will deny Nico when he looks like that? With pupils blown wide, and lips pulled into a smile. How can he deny him when he says stuff like that? That he’d kiss him anywhere as long as he let him.
Will climbs in the back. It’s there, with stars dotting the sky, a grimy windshield, and a tinny CD that Will realizes he’s been in love for a long, long time.